Father’s Day. Documentary suggestions.

I watched, last week, Sara Blecher’s documentary Surfing Soweto, a story of three young men who surf trains. This is a dangerous, but thrilling pastime for these men who’ve got no work, no prospects and little to do. Blecher offers various reasons why these men surf trains, and risk their lives. One important reason is that they are fatherless, they don’t have role models. This and other social and economic circumstances, have left the men disrespectuful of life. For this reason, the film suggests, they have turned to drink, drugs, and dangerous activities.
They are good at train surfing, the footage of their surfing is exciting, and earns them not a small degree of respect and sex appeal. But, too often young men senselessly die under a high voltage cable. And Blecher shows us a family, a devasted mother, in mourning, while at the funerals we see youths dance and celebrate their fallen heroes.
In contrast to this film about these fatherless men and their dangerous lives, Karin Slater’s beautiful and gentle film, An Intersection, is a tribute to a man, and his wife (both HIV positive), who wants to have a baby despite the circumstances and the prejudices they face. In an interview with the father, he opens the film with, “There are a lot of fathers out there, but few daddies.” Slater tells the story with gentleness and apparently little intervention of a family and especially of a father.
We meet the couple just before the birth of the baby, follow them to hospital and back all the while we’re drawn into their intimate world, and into the father’s desire to be a parent again after the tragic loss of his first wife and a young child.
Watch the films. The next screening of An Intersecton is at the Encounters Documentary Festival in Johannesburg on Tuesday 21 June. I am not sure when Surfing Soweto will be screened next in South Africa. But tonight it is showing in Tarifa, Spain.